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Erik (The Phantom of the Opera)
Erik is the main antagonist of Gaston Leroux's 1910 novel The Phantom of the Opera. He is also the many film adaptations of the novel, notably the 1925 film adaptation starring Lon Chaney, Sr., and Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical. Contents show Character historyedit In the original novel, few details are given regarding Erik's past, although there is no shortage of hints and implications throughout the book. Erik himself laments the fact that his mother was horrified by his appearance (causing him to run away from home at a young age), and that his father, a master mason, never saw him. It is also revealed that "Erik" was not, in fact, his birth name, but one that was given or found "by accident", as Erik himself says within the work. Leroux sometimes calls him "the man's voice"; Erik also refers to himself as "The Opera Ghost", "The Angel of Music", and attends a masquerade as theRed Death (evidently Erik is familiar with Poe's famous short story). Most of the character's history is revealed by a mysterious figure, known through most of the novel as The Persian or the Daroga, who had been a local police chief inPersia, following Erik to Paris; other details are discussed in the novel's epilogue e.g. his birthplace is given as a small town outside of Rouen, France. Born hideously deformed, he is a "subject of horror" for his family and as a result, he runs away as a young boy and falls in with a band of Gypsies, making his living as an attraction in freak shows, where he is known as "le mort vivant" ("the living death"). During his time with the tribe, Erik becomes a great illusionist, magician, and ventriloquist. His reputation for these skills and his unearthly singing voice spreads quickly, and one day a fur trader mentions him to the Shah of Persia. The Shah orders the Persian to fetch Erik and bring him to the palace. TheShah-in-Shah commissions Erik, who proves himself a gifted architect, to construct an elaborate palace in Mazenderan. The edifice is designed with so many trap doors and secret rooms that not even the slightest whisper could be considered private. The design itself carries sound to a myriad of hidden locations, so that one never knew who might be listening. At some point under the Shah's employment, Erik is also a political assassin, using a unique noose referred to as the Punjab Lasso. The Persian dwells on the vague horrors that existed at Mazenderan rather than going in depth into the actual circumstances involved. The Shah, pleased with Erik's work and determined that no one else should have such a palace, orders Erik blinded. Thinking that Erik could still make another palace even without his eyesight, the Shah orders Erik's execution. It is only by the intervention of the daroga (the Persian) that Erik escapes. Erik then goes to Constantinople and is employed by its ruler, helping build certain edifices in the Yildiz-Kiosk, among other things. However, he has to leave the city for the same reason he left Mazenderan: he knows too much. He also seems to have traveled to Southeast Asia, since he claims to have learned to breathe underwater using a hollow reed from the "Tonkin pirates". By this time Erik is tired of his nomadic life and wants to "live like everybody else". For a time he works as a contractor, building "ordinary houses with ordinary bricks". He eventually bids on a contract to help with the construction of the Palais Garnier, commonly known as the Paris Opéra. During the construction he is able to make a sort of playground for himself within the Opera House, creating trapdoors and secret passageways throughout every inch of the theatre. He even builds himself a house in the cellars of the Opera where he could live far from man's cruelty. Erik has spent twenty years composing a piece entitled Don Juan Triumphant. In one chapter after he takes Christine to his lair, she asks him to play her a piece from his masterwork. He refuses and says, "I will play you Mozart, if you like, which will only make you weep; but my Don Juan, Christine, burns." Eventually, after she has wrenched off his mask and seen his deformed face, he begins to play it. Christine says that at first it seemed to be "one great awful sob," but then became alert to its nuances and power, as the music was able to convey to her the misery he has endured throughout his life and the hope he finally felt for love. Upon its completion, he originally plans to go to his bed (which is a coffin) and "never wake up," but by the final chapters of the novel, (during which Erik kidnaps Christine right from the stage during a performance), Erik expresses his wish to marry Christine and live a comfortable bourgeois life after his work has been completed. He has stored a massive supply of gunpowder under the Opera, and, should she refuse his offer, plans to detonate it. When she acquiesces to his desires in order to save herself, her lover Raoul (who, aided by the Persian, went looking for Christine and fell into Erik's torture chamber), and the denizens of the Opera, we find out that his part of the bargain was to take the Persian and Raoul above ground. He does so with the Persian, but Raoul was kept "a hostage" and was "locked up comfortably, properly chained" in the dungeon under the opera. When he returns, he finds Christine waiting for him, like "a real living wife" and he swore she tilted her forehead toward him, and he kissed it. Then he says he was so happy that he fell at her feet, crying, and she cries with him, calling him "poor, unhappy Erik" and taking his hand. At this point, he is "just a poor dog ready to die for her" and he returns to her the ring she had lost and said that she was free to go and marry Raoul. Erik frees Raoul and he and Christine leave. But before they do, Erik makes Christine promise that when he dies she will come back and bury him. Then she kisses Erik's forehead. Erik dies three weeks later, but not before he goes to visit the Persian and tells him everything, and promises to send him Erik's dearest possessions: the papers that Christine wrote about everything that had happened with her "Angel of Music" and some things that had belonged to her. Christine keeps her promise and returns to the Opera to bury Erik and place the plain gold band he had given her on his finger. Leroux claims that a skeleton bearing such a ring was later unearthed in the Opera cellars. 1 Variations of Erik's storyedit Phantomedit Many different versions of Erik's life are told through other adaptations such as films, television shows, books, and musicals. A popular of adapted books is the Susan Kay novel Phantom, the fictional in-depth story of Erik from the time of his birth to the end of his life at the Paris Opera House. For the most part, Kay's novel stays in context with Erik's life history as laid down by Leroux, however Kay (as explained in her Author's Note) changes and shapes the character to match her own vision, influenced by other adaptations besides the original. In addition, the ending/resolution is quite different from Leroux's. The story follows Erik through his entire life, starting with the night of his birth, and is told from different viewpoints throughout the novel (Erik's mother, Erik, Nadir/the Persian, Christine, and Raoul). Kay places the highest priority on portraying romantic aspects of Erik's life. He falls in love twice throughout the novel, but neither of these occasions truly end happily. Yeston and Kopitedit The theatrical songwriting team of Maury Yeston and Arthur Kopit created a musical based on the story which investors backed out of after Webber's version became a huge hit. Erik is portrayed as much kinder and more sympathetic, and also with more of a sense of humor. His mother was a singer in the Opera and, having discovered that she was pregnant with an illegitimate child, swallowed poison. This is the reason for his disfigurement. He was born within the catacombs of the opera house and lived there his entire life. His mother died when he was a young child. His father, Gerard Carriere, was the manager and kept him safe all that time. Over the years, Erik became the creative driving force for the opera company. No artistic decision was made without Carriere seeking his approval. It is implied that the main reason for Erik's attraction to Christine is that her astonishing voice and beauty remind him of his mother, the only person who was ever able to look at him with happiness. Yet when he finally brings himself to show Christine his face, she runs away. Christine feels intensely remorseful afterwards and when he is eventually cornered by the police, at the end of the play, she takes off his mask and smiles. This storyline was also the basis for the 1990 miniseries starring Charles Dance, Teri Polo and Burt Lancaster as Carriere. The Canary Traineredit In Nicholas Meyer's novel The Canary Trainer, Sherlock Holmes develops several theories as to the Phantom's identity. His first idea is that he is an employee of the Opera; however, when the Phantom's knowledge of the Opera becomes evident, Holmes then believes that he is Charles Garnier, having faked his own death. When Garnier's corpse is identified, Holmes then theorizes that the Phantom was Edouard LaFosse, the (fictional) assistant of Garnier who designed much of the Opera's interior and who allegedly died after a building collapse. Holmes theorizes that he did not die, but was merely disfigured and therefore took to hiding in the Opera. However, when Holmes finally confronts the Phantom, he claims that he cannot speak without his mask, as his mother forced him to wear it whenever he wished to speak as a child, and he is not Edouard LaFosse. Holmes therefore admits that he is not sure how true any of the theories or claims of the Phantom's identity are. The Phantom never provides a given name in the novel; he only tells Christine that his name is "Nobody" (a reference to the name Odysseus gave Polyphemus in the Odyssey). Regardless of his identity, the Phantom in The Canary Trainer is much more unhinged and bloodthirsty than in the original novel or play. For example, when killing Madame Giry's replacement with the chandelier, he kills twenty-six others as well, just to ensure that he kills his main target. The Angel of the Operaedit In Sam Siciliano's novel The Angel of the Opera, Sherlock Holmes is brought in to solve the case of the Opera Ghost, and both Erik's and Holmes's stories unfold through the eyes of Holmes's assistant, Henri Vernier. Siciliano places Holmes and Vernier at several of the crucial scenes in Erik and Christine's relationship, and draws parallels between Erik and Holmes, identifying both as men who have sociopathic tendencies, but inside whom emotions run deep. Holmes identifies/sympathizes with Erik so much that after Christine leaves him, Holmes brings him back to England. One of the first people that Erik meets on his arrival is a blind girl with a fondness for music. Erik's deformityedit In the original novel, Erik is described as corpse-like and is referred to as having a "death's-head" (human skull) throughout the story. He has no nose; eyes that are sunken so deep that all is seen are two skull-like eye sockets except when his golden eyes glow in the dark; skin that is yellow and tightly stretched across his bones; and only a few wisps of ink-black hair behind his ears and on his forehead. (His mouth is never described in as much detail, but is referred to as a 'lipless' 'dead mouth' by Christine, and Erik loosely acknowledges that his mouth/lips are abnormal later on when lifting up his mask to display ventriloquism.) He is described as extremely thin and his clothes hang on a "skeleton." Christine graphically describes his cold, bony hands, which also smell of death. Erik woefully describes himself to Christine as a corpse who is "built up with death from head to foot." So, unlike almost all adaptations, the original Erik's deformity goes beyond his face and affects his entire body. Erik was born with this deformity, was exhibited as 'le mort vivant' in freak shows and even sometimes plays up his macabre appearance, such as sleeping in a coffin and dressing up as the Red Death for the masked ball. Lon Chaney, Sr.'s characterization of Erik in the silent film (released in 1925) remains closest to the book in content, in that Erik's face resembles a skull with an elongated nose slit and protruding, crooked teeth. In this version, Erik is said to have had his disfigurement from birth. Chaney was a master make-up artist and was considered avant garde for creating and applying Erik's facial makeup design himself. It is said he kept it secret until the first day of filming. The result was allegedly so frightening to the ladies of the time, theaters showing the movie were cautioned to keep smelling salts on hand for the women who fainted in shock. Several movies based on the novel also vary the deformities (or in the case of Dario Argento's film, the lack thereof, where Erik was a normal, handsome man raised by rats). In Universal's 1943 adaptation, a poor musician tries to publish his music, and then wrongly accuses the publisher Maurice Pleyel of trying to steal his music. The Phantom character then murders the publisher by strangulation and tries to retrieve his music, only to have his face burned by having etching acid thrown in his face by the publisher's assistant, Georgette Desjardins. The rock opera Phantom of the Paradise has Winslow (the Erik character) get his head caught in a record-press and Robert Englund's horror-version has him selling his soul to Satan and having his face mutilated as a result (this version also has a gruesome variation on the mask, in which Erik is sewing flesh to his face) In Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical adaptation (taking a tip from Universal's 1943 spin on the story), only half of Erik's face is deformed (thus the famous half-mask often associated with Erik's appearance.) His show was originally planned to have a full mask and full facial disfigurement, but when the director, Hal Prince, realized that it would make expression onstage very difficult, they halved the mask. The logo featuring a full mask was publicized before the change. The deformity in the musical includes a gash on the right side of his partly balding head with exposed skull tissue, an elongated right nostril, a missing right eyebrow, swollen lips, different colored eyes, and a wrinkled, warped right cheek. The lyrics in the Phantom's final scene in his lair have sometimes been interpreted to mean that the deformities affect his ability to engage in intercourse since having been questioned by Christine if she had been taken to become "Prey for his lust of flesh?" he responds "That fate, which condemns me to wallow in blood/Has also denied me the joys of the flesh." However this has been clarified; the line instead refers to the Phantom's lack of sexual experience as a result of his face. It originally took roughly four hours per performance to put the prosthetics on in the original London productions. On Broadway, it was cut to roughly three. More than one Phantom has described make-up disasters onstage. Michael Crawford recounts a story where he pulled away from the kiss at the end only to see that "his lower lip was now hanging off Sarah Brightman's face!". To cover the flub, he pulled her back for another kiss and "took back the lips" and kept that side of his head turned away from the audience. In the 2004 film adaptation, Erik's makeup was made to look much less gruesome than previous adaptations of the story. Instead of a skull-like face, his disfigurement resembles that of a malformed face, which he covers with the mask and a wig. Film Critic Roger Ebert noted that Butler was more "conventionally handsome" than his predecessor "in a GQ kind of way".2 Performersedit Lon Chaney, Sr. as Erik, The Phantom, in Universal's 1925 silent film version of The Phantom of the Opera. Filmedit Onscreen, Erik has often been cast as a tragic hero but also a tragic villain, depending on the film's point of view. * Lon Chaney, Sr. in the 1925 American silent version by Rupert Julian, The Phantom of the Opera, starring Mary Philbin as Christine Daaé. * Claude Rains in the 1943 Technicolor version of Phantom of the Opera. * Herbert Lom in the 1962 version of The Phantom of the Opera. * William Finley in the 1974 rock-musical version of The Phantom of the Opera, Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise. * Michael Jackson in the movie adaption of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version The Phantom of the Opera (1989) * Robert Englund in the 1989 horror film version of The Phantom of the Opera. * Julian Sands in Dario Argento's adaptation in 1998. * Gerard Butler in the movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version The Phantom of the Opera (2004) Televisionedit * Maximilian Schell in the 1983 television series. * Charles Dance in the 1990 NBC two-part television miniseries. * Geo in the TV movie adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber's stage version The Phantom of The Opera parody as Phantom Geo. Theatreedit * Edward Petherbridge, of the 1976 English play version. * Peter Straker in Ken Hill's musical version in 1984. * David Staller in his own camp-musical stage version. * Richard White in Yeston/Kopit's stage version. Andrew Lloyd Webber musicaledit See main list: The Phantom of the Opera * Michael Crawford in the original cast of the 1986 Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. * Robert Guillaume * Colm Wilkinson (1989) * Anthony Warlow in Australian performance of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical (1990, 2007) * Rob Guest, who subsequent to Anthony Warlow, played the role a record 2,289 times in the Australian production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical.1 * David Shannon and Stephen John Davies * Hugh Panaro * Howard McGillin the longest running Phantom The Phantom of the Opera * Anthony Crivello in Phantom: The Las Vegas Spectacular (2006-2012) * John Owen-Jones The West End Production * Ted Keegan * Steve Barton played the role as well as the original Raoul in London * Grant Norman played the role in London's West End * Brad Little * Gary Mauer * Davis Gaines * Mark Jacoby * Paul Stanley on stage in Toronto. (1999) * Kevin Gray * David Gaschen * Robert Finlayson * Peter Karrie * Ethan Freeman * Ciaran Sheehah * John Cudia * Thomas Borchert * Thomas James O'leary one of the longest running phantoms * Zoltan Miller * Earl Carpenter played the role in the London West End. * Matthew Cammelle * Miles Braithwaite played the role at Stanwell School, Penarth, in the UK Schools Premier - December 2011 * Luke Davies played Phantom at Treorchy Comprehensive School in the UK Wales Premier - February 2012 * Ramin Karimloo played both Raoul and The Phantom in the London West End, as well as The Phantom in the West End production of Love Never Dies * Ben Lewis in Love Never Dies Australian production - May 2011 * Geronimo Rauch the current London West End Phantom * Peter Jöback * Hugh Panaro Previous Phantom had portrayed both Raoul and the Phantom. * Norm Lewis * James Barbour the current Broadway Phantom Popular cultureedit * The heavy metal band Iced Earth has a song called "The Phantom Opera Ghost" on an album titled "Horror Show" * The heavy metal band Iron Maiden has a song called "The Phantom of the Opera" * The symphonic metal group Nightwish performs a cover of 'The Phantom of the Opera', the title song in Andrew Lloyd Webber's hit musical. * In Count Duckula, the episode "A Fright At The Opera" parodies The Phantom of the Opera. * Universal Studios' attraction, Beetlejuice's Rock n' Roll Graveyard Revue, features the Phantom of the Opera as a rock star. * In MAD Magazine's October 1990 issue, at the end of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles parody, "Teenrage Moolah Nitwit Turtles", The Phantom of the Opera, Ed Norton (a sewer worker from The Honeymooners), and The Beast from the 1988 series Beauty and the Beast, nag the Turtles about their making the sewers noisy and messy. * The 1988 movie, Scooby-Doo and the Ghoul School shows The Phantom as being more like a ghost, and his daughter, Phantasma, plays the organ. * In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the Phantom appearance is the member of Les Hommes Mystérieux, an analogue of the League led by Fantômas. * R.L. Stine's Goosebumps book series includes The Phantom of the Auditorium, where junior high school students put on the play, only to meet a mysterious student and have things go wrong. * In Attack of the Killer Tomatoes: The Animated Series, the episode "The Phantomato of the Opera" shows the Phantomato, a disfigured tomato, rescuing Tara Boumdeay from the Killer Tomatoes, and she pulls his mask off as he plays for her. * In Tiny Toon Adventures, "Toon TV", the video for "It's In His Kiss (The Shoop Shoop Song)", shows Buster Bunny as the Phantom and Babs Bunny as Christine as she takes off his mask. * In The Simpsons episode "Lisa's Wedding", after Elizabeth Hoover and Seymour Skinner are invited to Lisa Simpon's wedding, they lament about the fate of Martin Prince, and he is shown dressed as the Phantom, with half his face disfigured, playing an organ in the school basement. * In the SpongeBob SquarePants episode "Something Smells", SpongeBob plays dramatic music on an organ while wearing a cape, only to turn around and reveal his mask to be Groucho glasses. * In the MMORPG AdventureQuest Worlds, the proxy for the 6th Lord of Chaos named Dischordia is dressed like the Phantom of the Opera. * In the Monster High franchise, it is known that the Phantom himself teaches a music class. His fictitious daughter, Operetta, is also in attendance at the school. * The Japanese rock band, B'Z has a song called 'love phantom'. At the end of the song, it features a woman singing like Christine did at the end of the song 'Phantom of the Opera' * In the Disney show Phineas and Ferb, viewers see Phineas as the Phantom on the episode "Roller Coaster: The Musical!" When he is singing the song "Hey Ferb". Viewers will also see him in a half-faced mask, with a cape and clothes like the Phantom's in the 2004 movie production, as he and Ferb are riding on a small boat(Much like the one in the mirror) through a dark tunnel. * In Happy Feet Two, Mumble's son is named Erik, and sings opera. * In an episode of Glee, Kurt initially intends to sing "Music of the Night" for his NYADA audition. He begins his audition with the song playing Erik and Rachel playing Christine. Halfway through, he has a change of heart decides to sing a song that represents him better. * In an episode of Parks and Recreation, Leslie is asked to describe her ideal partner for her profile on a dating website. She proceeds to describe her ideal man as "dark, mysterious, and he can sing, and he plays the organ." She is told by her friend that she "just described the phantom of the opera", but seems interested nonetheless. Category:Characters Category:Main Characters Category:Deceased characters Category:Males Category:Villains Category:Phantom of the Opera Category:Antagonists Category:Humans